Posts filed under ‘Education’
Things That Make You Go Hmmm . . . .
| Steve Phelan |
I had an interesting encounter with two economists in my college last week. The first was during a presentation I was giving to the MBA Association on buying opportunities in Las Vegas following the subprime debacle. I assured the audience that buying opportunities existed but you needed to to be very knowledgeable about the area of town in which you intended to buy. The professor of economics who preceded me in the presentation immediately retorted, “if so many opportunities exist then why isn’t everybody buying?” (more…)
Want a Euro Career?
| Nicolai Foss |
The center for which I serve as director, the Center of Strategic Management and Globalization at the Copenhagen Business School, has two vacancies in strategic management and/or international business on the assistant professor level. Check the job ad and mail me (njf.smg@cbs.dk) if you want to hear more. CBS, the second largest BSchool in Europe, is very much a “rising school” with an increasingly strong research culture, good career opportunities, and improving FT rankings every year. And Copenhagen is a funky boom-city. Not bad, eh?
Jacques Barzun Turns 100
| Peter Klein |
Jacques Barzun, the eminent historian and cultural critic, turns 100 in a couple of weeks. Barzun has written more books than I’ve read so it’s hard to give an overall summary of his contributions. This New Yorker profile tells us that “[m]ore than any other historian of the past four generations, Barzun has stood for the seemingly contradictory ideas of scholarly rigor and unaffected enthusiasm.” Now that’s a nice tribute.
Many of my friends like Barzun’s 2000 book From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, a sweeping history that compares favorably to Martin van Creveld’s Rise and Decline of the State. Perhaps more relevant for the O&M crowd is Barzun’s 1974 Clio and the Witch Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History, and History, a defense of traditional, qualitative, narrative history against the newer disciplines of cliometrics and what Barzun calls “psycho-history.” Cliometrics, which substitutes simplistic, mono-causal explanations for the complex interplay of people and institutions through time, is attempting “to rescue Clio from pitiable maidenhood by artificial insemination.” Agree or disagree, you have to respect the way the man writes.
A Plea for Economic Education
| Peter Klein |
As economists have long emphasized, individuals need not understand the full benefits of participation in the division of labor to benefit from it. But when the market is continually under attack from special interests and from ideologues both left and right, a little knowledge goes a long way. Jeff Tucker puts it nicely:
The old-style classical liberals [Adam Smith, Hayek] reveled in the fact that [the market’s] “impersonal forces” worked without anyone really being aware of them, or having to understand them. The checkout lady at the store just shows up, pushes buttons, gets paid, and stays or leaves based on her assessment of her own well-being. Everyone else does the same. The pursuit of self-interest generates this amazing global matrix that benefits everyone.
The old liberals reveled in the fact that no one had to understand it, but then the system itself came under attack, and needed defense. It had to be understood to be explained, and explained in order to be preserved.
This is why Ludwig von Mises set out to revise liberal doctrine. It is not enough that people participate unknowingly in the market economy. They must understand it, and see how, and precisely how, their smallest and selfish contribution leads to the general good, and, moreover, they must desire that general good.
All of which is to say that in an enlightened world, it would be a good thing for that cashier to understand economics from the point of view of those who pay her. It would be good for striking workers to understand how they are harming not only their bosses but also themselves. It would be good for voters to see how supporting government benefits for themselves harms society at large.
An economically literate public is the foundation for keeping that amazing and wild machine called the market working and functioning for the benefit of the whole of humanity.
The Social Transformation of American Business Schools
| Peter Klein |
Is management a profession? Are collegiate schools of business legitimate professional schools? The answers Rakesh Khurana’s book provides to both questions are “not yet” and “maybe never.”
Thus opens Donald Stabile’s EH.Net review of Rakesh Khurana’s From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton, 2007). Business schools, argues Khurana, emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to provide “legitimacy” to management, giving it the same professional status as medicine or law. In Khurana’s account, this project failed largely because business schools, under the influence of powerful foundations such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford, promoted a curriculum focused on quantitative methods rather than the softer elements of ethics and social responsibility. (The main culprit: economics, or at least a 1970s-era Chicago school caricature of economics, as we’ve seen many times before.)
For additional commentary and discussion see Jim Heskett’s HBS Working Knowledge piece and this article from Business Week.
Academics and Ideology Redux
| Peter Klein |
More on academics and left-liberal ideology. Becker and Posner weigh in with explanations based on demographic change, selection bias, and other structural characteristics of higher education. See also these comments by Ilya Somin (1, 2) and David Bernstein on the new study by Gross and Simmons. David wins the quote-of-the-day prize with this gem:
It turns out, according to the study, that 17.6 of professors in the social scientists consider themselves Marxists. Only academics doing a survey of other academics could possibly think that this is low.
Getting a PhD Takes Too Long
| Peter Klein |
So says the (US and Canadian) Council of Graduate Schools, studying ways to shorten the process, as reported in today’s NY Times. Some startling figures:
The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.
In economics, this problem has been alleviated, to some degree, by the rise of the three-essays dissertation, now the dominant model at the major research universities. In many economics departments, at least one essay is mostly finished by the end of the second year (written as a required second-year econometrics paper). Sociology, despite having become — like economics and strategy — a discipline that communicates mostly through articles, not books, seems to have stuck with the “grand treatise” model for the dissertation.
Organizations and Markets 
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